Taboo or not Taboo

Standing at the corner of Mansfield Road, I was proud of the demonstrators who were reminding my university what, at best, it is still about: the pursuit of truth and the defence of reason. Protests against student loans or higher rents – these we expect. But here were students turning out on a chilly Saturday morning to stand up for science.

Yeah – well it’s becoming more and more clear that we all really need to stand up for those – science, the pursuit of truth, the defense of reason. If we don’t they’re going to be eroded more and more, as we’re told to be sensitive and respectful and spiritual and so shut up and obey.

For a few minutes, Mansfield Road, Oxford, was at the front line of a new struggle for freedom that is being fought in many different places and guises. These days, the main threats to freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of association no longer come from the totalitarian ideological superstate…[T]he distinctive feature of this new danger is the creeping tyranny of the group veto.

That’s one of the by-products of communalism. Or maybe not so much a by-product as a central goal.

Here the animal rights campaign has something in common with the extremist reaction to the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, as seen in the attacks on Danish embassies. In both cases, a particular group says: “We feel so strongly about this that we are going to do everything we can to stop it. We recognise no moral limits. The end justifies the means. Continue on this path and you must fear for your life.”…If the intimidators succeed, then the lesson for any group that strongly believes in anything is: shout more loudly, be more extreme, threaten violence, and you will get your way. Frightened firms, newspapers or universities will cave in, as will softbellied democratic states, where politicians scrabble to keep the votes of diverse constituencies.

Damn right they will. Violence and threats have that effect. They work. Theo Van Gogh has been definitively silenced. There’s no magic mechanism that keeps force and bullying and murder from doing what they’re meant to do.

But in our increasingly mixed-up, multicultural world, there are so many groups that care so strongly about so many different things, from fruitarians to anti-abortionists and from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Kurdish nationalists. Aggregate all their taboos and you have a vast herd of sacred cows. Let the frightened nanny state enshrine all those taboos in new laws or bureaucratic prohibitions, and you have a drastic loss of freedom.

Which is exactly why I disagreed with Stanley Fish about taboos. Taboos are bad because they are not reasoned; that is what makes them taboos; therefore they should not be enshrined in law.

If you agree with me so far, and believe that reason requires consistency, then you should want David Irving let out of his Austrian prison and Ken Livingstone let off with a rap over the knuckles. Why? Because the fateful tendency in all this is to reject everyone else’s group taboos while obstinately defending your own.

But that’s where I get off the train. Not because I think Irving should be in prison – I don’t think he should, although I’m not sure what I think about the Austrian law – but because I disagree that what’s operating with respect to Irving is a taboo. I disagree that the cartoons and Irving are exactly comparable. I don’t think reason does require consistency if consistency requires the ignoring of salient differences (which it doesn’t, because that wouldn’t actually be consistency). I think the discussion about Irving is a different discussion from the one about the cartoons (as I’ve said to the point of tedium), and I think it’s not useful to mash them together by calling them both group taboos.

What is sauce for the Islamist goose must be sauce for the fascist gander. What Irving says is horrible, an insult to the Jewish dead, survivors and relatives, but on any reasonable assessment it does not result in a significant threat to the physical safety or liberty of living human beings.

Well, that’s the problem – I’m not confident of that. Genocides have happened too often and too quickly lately for me to feel confident of that. Garton Ash may be right, but I disagree about the ‘on any reasonable assessment’ part. Especially given what just happened to Ilam Halimi, I don’t think anyone can be all that sure that no one listening to Irving will be pushed over that final edge, that no one listening to Irving will be inspired to find a Jew to torture to death. So I think worries about Irving are more than just taboos. Actually animal rights people and anti-abortionists could say the same thing – they also have reasoned arguments. Taboo isn’t really the right word for what Garton Ash is talking about here. But the point about the group veto doesn’t depend on the taboo idea, and it’s a good point.

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15 Responses to “Taboo or not Taboo”

“I don’t think anyone can be all that sure that no one listening to Irving will be pushed over that final edge, that no one listening to Irving will be inspired to find a Jew to torture to death.”

Can you be that sure that no one seeing a cartoon of the prophet will be pushed over that final edge, that no one seeing that cartoon will be inspired to be a suicide bomber on some Tel Aviv bus?

Pushed? Like I am pushed to run over old ladies by the sight of adverts for Boddingtons Bitter? Lets get away from this notion that the problem is the message, it is not. The problem is the twisted or broken conceptual structures of the people who act so unreasonably.

It’s funny how we assess the legal arm of the Austrian govt’s stance on this… If it was the stoning to death of a ‘progressive’ teacher in Afghanistan, it would be completely out of order naturally. If it were the death penalty for an English heroin dealer in Thailand, i’d be tempted to think ‘tough sh@t’. Irving falls somewhere in between these two. But Garton-Ash igonores the causality of a b@stard like Irving’s actions. By stirring up hate, which this global publicity inevitably does in certain quarters, what if a gang of neo-nazis in germany might not just go that little bit harder and faster this weekend and torch a couple of asylum seeker refuges, as they do from time to time ? What if there were deaths and serious injuries as a result of such an action ? Of course it’s not directly attributable, but Garton-Ash is a bit naive in assuming spouting this bulsh@t is victimless…

.. so to finish my point which a stupid head cold seems to be rendering impossible, my take is, perhaps jail is a bit extreme, but, hey, tough sh@t, that’s their rules and he’s a hatemongering @sshole.

I would however like to see denial outrages whipped up as strongly about Srebenica, Rwanda, and Stalin though – there’s plenty of people out there (Gosh – Chomsky-ites ?!) who play down the numbers on some of those gencocides… I would not want jail for any of them, but perhaps a good, solid, public arse-kicking. In a German stadium of course.

While I find Irving’s views on the holocaust reprehensible, I still defend the right of idiots, bigots, and the hopelessly bewildered to have their say. I think Christopher Hitchens said something to the effect that it is better to know what they are saying in the open so that we might openly refute them.

I’m not sure I can see your distinction so well. I accept that the Irving thing is about more than just taboos, although you could argue that the taboo element is a much greater proportion than the risk element nowadays. But you didn’t seem very happy about objections to the Danish cartoons that made reference to a wider anti-Muslim sentiment that went beyond simply offending the taboo against representing Mohammed.

Ultimately denying the Holocaust is a fairly obvious manifestation of anti-semitism, but literally it is simply a quibble about the historical record. [although I don’t think I really believe that they actually think the holocaust didn’t happen – it is more a performative signal of their anti-semitism, but hey, I don’t have a lot of experience with these people]

“I don’t think anyone can be all that sure that no one listening to Irving will be pushed over that final edge, that no one listening to Irving will be inspired to find a Jew to torture to death.”

And equally I don’t think that anyone can be sure that anyone reading those cartoons won’t be pushed to find a Muslim to beat up (probably the same people doing either ironically).

[completely irrelevantly when did these laws come in? I can see that laws against Mein Kampf could well have been brought in straight after the war in de-Nazification, but when was Hollocaust denial specifically a problem over Hollocaust-acceptance-and-really-rather-keen-on-it-too]

But what about the right to lie and falsify evidence? What of the right to publish books in which every single footnote (as Lipstadt pointed out on ‘Today’ last week – and she opposes Irving’s sentence) has something wrong with it? Is there a right to falsify history, in print? I think that’s a rather tricky question – no, I take that back, I think it’s a very difficult question.

“But you didn’t seem very happy about objections to the Danish cartoons that made reference to a wider anti-Muslim sentiment that went beyond simply offending the taboo against representing Mohammed.”

Because I found it unconvincing. Really. If the cartoons had been unmistakably anti-Muslim – had for instance been comparable to Ann Coulter’s insistence on talking about ‘towelheads’ – I wouldn’t have made the arguments I’ve been making. I know G said the cartoons bothered him because they did seem anti-Muslim – but I’m not convinced, in great part because nearly all the complaints we hear are about the prophet.

“And equally I don’t think that anyone can be sure that anyone reading those cartoons won’t be pushed to find a Muslim to beat up (probably the same people doing either ironically).”

True (except maybe for the ‘equally’ part). But there are different implications. If Irving were mocking or criticizing Judaism, the religion, instead of denying the Holocaust by falsifying the evidence, that would be a different matter. Protecting religion is a different thing from not protecting falsification of history.

But the connection between the potential ‘bad’ and the act is perhaps even more tenuous in the case of Holocaust denial is it not? Particularly if you take a literalist reading of the action – i.e. the man simply doesn’t believe that the Holocaust happened (or that is wasn’t as bad or systematic or whatever he claims to believe).

PM, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about it. Richard Evans said on ‘Today’ a few days ago that he thought the Austrian law was no longer necessary. He certainly knows enough about it – but he also said he thought, he didn’t say he was sure or certain. Lipstadt thinks Irving should not be in jail, but she understands Austria’s and Germany’s reasons for having the law. So – I don’t know. But I think it’s a factor, that it shouldn’t be overlooked, that’s all.

“Freedom is a principle that must be applied indiscriminately. We have to defend David Irving in order to defend ourselves. My freedoms are inextricably tied to Irving’s freedoms. Once the laws are in place to jail dissidents of Holocaust history, what’s to stop them from spreading to dissenters of religious or political histories, or to skepticism of any sort that deviates from the accepted canon?”

Message?! What message? Don’t f off! You mean because I didn’t address your post? I liked it, I thought it had a point, I just don’t always have time to answer every comment (plus I think it can seem a bit suffocating if I do – as if I think you can’t talk amongst yourselves without my interference or ‘help’).

But then PM said the same thing and I answered that one – I suppose because it was right after I’d posted. But that wasn’t a message! Don’t f off, Mike, you’ve been here for ages. [tears hair]